Here's the deal. Remember Expo 67?
Montreal's World Fair of 1967 relied on a custom-made $18 million train to ferry visitors around from the sites on the islands.
The Expo Express was an automated train that rolled 5.7 kilometers. Each train could hold 1,000 passengers and rolled by every five minutes.
The drivers did nothing and were there only to reassure passengers who might have worried about being on an automated vehicle.
The train was instrumental to the fantastic Expo 67 event.
But when it ended, the train wasn't needed much.
The fair continued for several years as Man and His World but only half of the train line was in use.
A private company called SUTRI bid $1,880,000 for 48 cars of the underused train in 1968.
Their plan was to modify the cars to fit on a monorail that would link Laval to the Henri Bourassa metro.Newspaper articles do not identify who was behind SUTRI (Societe des Transports Rapides Incorporated) or where exactly in Laval the train would stop.
Laval Mayor Jacques Tetreault was a vigorous supporter of the plan, as he anxiously sought a way for Laval to be linked to the Montreal metro system.
SUTRI's offer was accepted by the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition.
However the deal outraged Montrealers and the Gazette launched a Save the Express campaign, which solicited opposition letters from readers. Over 30,000 letters poured into the Gazette opposing the sale of the beloved train line.
Letter writers included out-of-towners, the provincial premier, as well as Frank Hanley, a veteran politician who had opposed the Expo World's Fair from the start.
On 29 October 1968 Gazette columnist Al Palmer handed the huge pile of letters over to city bigwig Lucien Saulnier.
The city committed to keeping the train where it was.
SUTRI was irritated and in a strangely emotional corporate statement they denounced the "dirt-slinging campaign launched by the City of Montreal."
Montreal soon committed to dealing half of the 48 train cars to Edmonton for the same $1.8 million fee but that never happened either.
The train kept running at the Man and His World fair site for two months a year until in October 1972.
Much of the train tracks were pulled up in 1974 and the cars were stored in a variety of places until being scrapped in 1995.Laval had to wait a long time before getting linked to the Montreal metro system.
On 28 April 2007 three stations opened in the suburban municipality, finally fulfilling a dream that came close to happening 38 years earlier.
Al Palmer died in March 1971 and Saulnier died June 1989. Tetrault died in 2018.